Ben’s reminiscences.

Sabrina’s recollections.

Small Helpless Mammal Stage

When she first came out, trailing not clouds of glory but a remarkable amount of tarry black poop, she was unbelievably tiny. In the exhaustion and relief after labour, the nurse finished her measurements and it was my turn to hold her. She weighed nothing, and it was almost too much to bear. She was so weak I felt like I was dissolving.

Those first two hours — when the hospital staff leaves the parents to have skin to skin in the labour room and breastfeed (if that’s their choice) — passed in the space of five minutes. But if the chronology was blurred then, it’s even more so looking back now. Was Ellie still on my chest as the doctor and two nurses each worked on a different body part, stitching me up, wiping me off, wiping Ellie off? I assume so. When did my eyes shift from fixating on Ben’s comforting blue ones to Ellie’s midnight eyes, taking in the world for the first time? How soon after the flurry did I bring her to my breast?

Eyes scrunched closed, her head scanning from side to side, mouth open, searching blindly for the nipple that she knew was out there. It was a search and destroy mission. From her first moments on the outside, she was on a mission, like a paratrooper who just landed behind enemy lines, stopping at nothing to complete demolish the enemy’s warehouses.

Compared to what I’d just gone through, there was no pain with that first feed (that would come later). Just relief that she was docked, so to speak, and maybe a bit of pride when the nurse remarked that I shouldn’t tell my friends how easily we’d stuck the landing. She was so tiny, but I was convinced she was strong.

Oogabooga

For the first few weeks, she wasn’t focused on the outside world and mostly only gave her attention to lights. Her eyes were darker blue then, like the ocean at night lit only by the moon. Or a blue granite, very old. She was looking inside, but if she was crying I’d take her outside on the deck and she’d gaze up at the sky and fall silent. Her one reponse to the outside world was the startle reflex, which we call oogabooga.

She jerks both hands up suddenly like Frankenstein’s Monster in response to just about anything. A change in direction while walking her to sleep: oogabooga! A creeky floor board: oogabooga! A breath on her face: oogabooga! There was often a 1 second delay between stimulus and response. Poe paws at the door to be let in. I hold my breath to see if it woke her. Just when I think I’m in the clear, she oogaboogas and jerks herself awake

Family Walks

Our goal is to go for a walk every day, the four of us. We manage it on our second day home from the hospital. We go slow, taking fifteen minutes to go halfway around the block. The next day we make it to the park 300 metres away. It’s hot so we drape blankets over the bassinet to keep the sun off Ellie. These walks are many things to me. Inside, we will often be in different rooms, one of us resting while the other keeps Ellie alive, but this is an activity we do together. It reinforces Poe’s place in our family. It is a marker of our progress as we walk a little further or a little quicker each day. It proves that we will be able to get out for adventures. The sun and the air and the rustle of leaves and the sight of familiar mountains soothes our ragged selves.

Sometimes we use the time to talk through what’s happening to us, sometimes we are silent. Either way, we always get back home feeling happy we went. Even on the days I am bone tired and the idea of getting (semi)-dressed is abhorrent, Ben gently but firmly tugs me out the door. It proves crucial for both my mental and physical postpartum recovery, and I credit Ben with helping immensely.

Velcro Baby

For the first six weeks, Ellie has almost never been out of one of our arms except while changing a diaper.

In fact, around the three month mark, Ben asks me to remind him where we’d been putting her to sleep before she accepted the bassinet.

“In our arms. We basically held her for 24 hours a day.” Ben’s eyes widen. “Oh, right! Man, what a time.”

In the small hours of the morning I am in the kitchen, lights dim, squinting at a book. Ellie is on a pillow on the table and I am holding her hand. I let go for a moment to turn the page and she fusses. I take her hand again and she relaxes back to sleep. I must remember this forever.

Froggy Leg and Minky Toes

In the bathroom sink for bath night, I’m gently wiping her feet when her toes suddenly curl around my fingers. My heart leaps. Since she was born I’ve been calling her a little capuchin out of my own lifelong fondness for monkeys, but I know I’m projecting this on her. Some fathers feel, deep down, that they might have made it as a pro football player if they only had the chance, and they push their kid to fulfill that fantasy for them. I am doing this in my own bizarre way. This is really the first monkey-like behaviour I can point to. Her toes are so itty, but she grabs with them reflexivly, and she has not tried to do this with her fingers yet. It’s very vindicating.

She maintained the “newborn scrunch” for a long time, and nowhere was that more evident than on the change table. Even now, more often than not her knees are tucked up as soon as her onesie is pushed aside. But every once in awhile a tiny foot will go shooting downward, usually towards the poopy pad sitting off to the side.

Colic walks

Her cry lacerates my heart. It takes all my attention and I have to fix it instantly no matter what right now. I rush and make mistakes with her diaper. Cycling through different holding positions and tactics, we try cradle, we try airplane, we try parrot, we try ride ’em cowboy, we try change table, we try bright rooms and dark rooms and white noise and sing-songs. Oh my Ellie oh my little love oh my Ellie how do I help you how do I fix it. For a few weeks in October, she gets colicky in the evenings, with the worst of it between 6:30 and 8pm.

One night, the cries are particularly intense and unending. We’ve been taking turns holding her, each of us wearing earplugs and communicating with hand gestures and exaggerated mouthing of words. Sometimes one of us retreats to the darkened bedroom and slips under the covers to refill our bucket. Sometimes I simply sit with her, eyes unfocused and mind blank. We check in with each other, ask what “number” we’re at. Five and up means we’ve still got gas in the tank; Four and below are the danger regions, where the other person takes over if at all possible. When I sense that Ben’s running particularly low, I decide to just take Ellie around the block, hoping she’ll cry herself out and if she doesn’t, at least Ben will get ten minutes of quiet. As we walk through the chill I keep glancing at my watch, counting the seconds and hoping the neighbours don’t hear her screams and call Child Protective Services on us. She falls quiet after 9 minutes (felt like 20). Suddenly Ben is beside me, breaking me out of my dissociative tunnel, saying that tonight there’s supposed to be northern lights visible. With Ellie now asleep and me desperate to keep her that way, we decide to walk to the boardwalk together to try and catch the aurora. The display is a shimmering pink and green lining to an otherwise hard night.

Bright Eyes

Just before she turns six weeks old, her expression changes. I think she is starting to reckon with the outside world and have the first inkling that what she is seeing in her mind is different than what she is seeing through her eyes. She tracks movement. She stares unblinking into my eyes and makes delicate vocalizations, like she is earnestly trying to communicate something of the utmost importance in the language I’ve forgotten. I tell her I know she is trying to tell me something and one day we will be able to communicate and if she can only remember what she wants to say, she can tell me then. This seems acceptable to her because she looks away, her eyes now glassy. She is looking inward as she focuses on a big poop.

Aaoooo

She begins to expand her sound vocabulary beyond simple wailing. First, the cries diverge depending on her needs. Her hungry cry is snorty and persistent. It earns her the nickname lil piglet. Her tired cry is kind of whiny and sounds sorrowful. Her gas cry is sharp, panic-inducing, and the closest to her loud pain howl. But then, she discovers that she can make even more, quieter noises. One of the earlier varieties, and our favourite, is aaoooo. She forms a tiny o with her mouth and while maintaining eye contact — always eye contact — sends up a sound that leaves her lips as babble but reaches our ears as “I love you”. It is heartachingly tender and endearing. The corners of her mouth tilt up so there’s a hint of a smile. To her delight, we copy her, and go long past bedtime trading aaoooos. Eventually she moves on to other tones that would fit more in a dinosaur’s repertoire, and while this is also a fun development, we try for weeks to get her to do the aaooooo again. She declines, offering up a warbling pterodactyl yodel instead. Like so many other stages, the aaoooo is gone.

Gummy Smile

The first smiles are approximate. The muscles don’t quite do it right and it looks more like relief from gas. But after a couple days, I get a real one.

The very first suspected social smile happens when Ben is holding her. We’re standing in the kitchen, and the corner of her mouth lifts while she gazes straight into his eyes. I well up and Ben’s voice catches as he whispers “hi Ellie, hello.” This happens around four weeks though, when it’s possible, but uncommon for social smiling to emerge. So we’re not sure. But it sure feels like a smile.

The next week my mom is here and she confirms: “That’s definitely a smile!” she says as her voice reaches an octave that only dogs and apparently Ellie can hear. It starts to happen more frequently, and with increasing certainty.

Her mouth makes a wide grin and her eyes crinkle. It is uninhibited joy, her whole face working to show pleasure. It is nice when people smile at me, but this is something else. This feels like a total validation of who I am. This little creature that has not learned how to “behave” or dissemble, has learned who I am and likes it when my face hovers into view. Getting her smile quickly becomes important to me and no matter how the night went, it is a good morning when she beams at me in gummy delight.

My fellow morning dove, Ellie is happiest and quickest to smile in the mornings. I like to think it’s because she’s refreshed after a good sleep (always a parenting win) but it might very well be that she’s just relieved to have her diaper changed (she loves laying on the changing mat, maybe because she’s a little nudist who prefers an unencumbered tushie– another trait she got from me). Within weeks a nascent laugh, more of a squawk really, joins the party.

Bassinet

Now I rock her to sleep. It might take minutes or hours. When I am sure she is out cold I tiptoe to the basinet. I know which floorboards have a creaky booby trap. I lower her slowly ever so slowly so that she does not feel like she’s falling and oogabooga herself. Touchdown. I ease my arms out from under her but keep contact on her so she still feels pressure and warmth. With one hand I tuck in a blanket and watch the clock with the other hand on her chest. My rule, from hard experience, is 2 full minutes. My back aches and time crawls. I count my breaths. Then I slowly lie down on the folding mattress.

The goal is to get Sabrina at least a 4 hour stretch to start the night. At first I fly to Ellie at any little whimper. I hold her hand and soothe her back down. After a couple weeks, I learn that she will usually self-soothe and it is better to lie still and hold my breath. But sometimes I wake up because she’s too quiet and even though I know better, I crawl to the bassinet and peer over the side to make sure I can see the faint movement of her chest up and down.

Waterfall spit-ups

She’s the spit-up queen. My personal favourite was when she let loose a giant waterfall of milk while we waited in the doctor’s office for her updated weighing. I’m convinced that it docked at least a few ounces from her tally. It also totalled her onesie and she rode home in the carseat naked.

She is such a greedy little goblin, drinking far more than her tiny belly can hold, grunting like a piggy, giving herself a tummy ache. She must be burped, sometimes for half an hour at a stretch, until she has disgorged enough gas and extra milk. Usually her spit-ups come without warning. Sometimes I don’t even notice right away if she’s on my shoulder and I can’t see her silently gushing warm milk down my back.

Pee-pad sniper

Up until three months, she pees 9 out of every 10 times her diaper is off. It is like some insane Pavlovian fountain, as soon as all protections are removed, she pees. We go through onesies and change pad covers like crazy, calling out “she got me again!” We stop using change pad covers and just put her straight on the plastic. We learn to quickly slide a cloth diaper insert under her bum as soon as we take off the diaper to protect the onesie. She adapts. Starts lifting her legs and curling up so the pee runs up over her belly instead of south to the absorbent pad. We slide the pad further up to cover that avenue. She spits up from the mouth, distracting us at one end of her tiny body while twisting the stream at the other end. Almost every diaper change ends up being a full outfit change. I declare she has the cunning of a spy and the accuracy of a sniper. Even my Mom, ever patient, mutters “oh you little runt” when Ellie punishes her for thinking she can change the diaper quick enough.

After preventing her from soiling her onesie a couple times in a row, I start to brag a little to Sabrina. This is a mistake. The next change, Ellie comes out all guns blazing and I’m simply overwhelmed by the jets of poo, sudden spit-ups, and silent pees when I’m distracted by the other extrusions. She stares me in the eyes and smiles, feet kicking in the air, waiting for me to realize my defeat.